LAS
VEGAS, Nev. — Few parts of the nation are drier than the Las
Vegas Valley. Yet, like a circus performer catching bullets in his
teeth, the city here flouts the terrors of the desert and has
achieved its own sort of rowdy transcendence.

Las Vegas
"owes nothing to its surroundings," wrote historian Hal Rothman in
his 2002 paean to the city, Neon Metropolis. Today, 1.7 million people — 70 percent of Nevada’s
population — live in Las Vegas and its suburbs. Unlike more
traditional Western resource-extraction economies, which reach far
out into the countryside for their fuel, Las Vegas tends to
generate its wealth in place: The city’s $60 billion-a-year
economy is dominated by the service industry — casinos and
tourism — and its environmental footprint is remarkably
small.

In fact, as the city has grown, its economy has
come to serve as a life-support system for much of the rest of the
state: Thanks to Las Vegas, 10 of Nevada’s 17 counties are
guaranteed a fixed amount of tax revenue from the state, far more
than they actually generate themselves.

Las Vegas’
phenomenal success has led boosters such as Rothman, a University
of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor, to tout it as a model for
the New West. But the city’s economy, powerful as it is, is
perched atop a precarious pedestal: A tiny slice of the Colorado
River’s water.

That doesn’t particularly
concern Rothman. "No American city has ever ceased to grow because
of a lack of water," he wrote in Neon
Metropolis, "and it’s unlikely that Las Vegas will
be the first."

"The only genuinely determining factor in
acquiring water," he argued, "is cost." And money, Rothman wrote,
"is no problem in Las Vegas."

As if to prove him right,
Las Vegas is now pushing forward with what will be the biggest
groundwater-pumping project ever built in the United States: a $2
billion effort that will pump more than 58 billion gallons of water
out of the ground every year. The project will reach far beyond the
glitter of Las Vegas into the valleys of eastern Nevada’s
Basin and Range country, ultimately extending as far north as the
area around the high-desert town of Ely.

When the play of
light across the Great Basin is just right, it reveals the pockets
of water that seem to disappear in the glare of the midday sun:
stingy seeps, shy rivulets that poke their way across the desert,
great limpid pools of water bubbling into the light. Those are all
mere hints of the watery treasure trove that lies beneath the
entire area: An enormous aquifer that spreads across some 100,000
square miles of eastern Nevada and western Utah.

Las
Vegas has always pushed the limits harder than any other place,
because it has had to — and because it can. "When
you’ve got a city the size of Las Vegas, that’s growing
as fast as it is, it’s hard to estimate what’s going to
be economically infeasible," says Mike Dettinger, a U.S. Geological
Survey hydrologist who authored some of the first comprehensive
studies of the aquifer. "Anything’s possible if you have a
big-enough city at the other end of the pipeline."

Las
Vegas may, however, have reached the tipping point, beyond which
its continued growth can only come at the expense of the rest of
the state. The groundwater project in the Basin and Range will pry
open a place of tremendous biological diversity that includes Great
Basin National Park, three national wildlife refuges, at least
three state and five federally listed threatened and endangered
species, and a host of rural farming and ranching communities.
Tapping the aquifer could unravel the tenuous hydrologic,
ecological and political equilibrium in the Great Basin, giving the
lie to boosters’ claims that Las Vegas is the city of the
future. And, ultimately, the water project may be a prelude to an
all-out war for the waters of the Colorado River.

The fight building over Nevada’s groundwater might
never have started, if not for a space-age nuclear weapons program.
In the late 1970s — at the same time he was hoping to create
a legacy as a champion of arms control — President Jimmy
Carter backed the MX missile program, a plan to shuffle 200
intercontinental ballistic missiles between 4,600 shelters in the
Great Basin. The shell game was essentially a bluff, meant to force
the Soviets to the negotiating table or risk blowing their entire
nuclear wad shooting missiles at empty bunkers.

To the
rural Nevadans who were going to be on the receiving end of a
project designed to draw Soviet fire, the MX program made less
sense. Environmentalists, Indians, ranchers and academics allied to
mount a fight that swept the state. Steve Bradhurst, who directed
the fight against the MX program for the governor’s office,
says, "Wherever you went, particularly in rural Nevada, you’d
see stop signs … you’d see ‘STOP,’ and then
people would paint on ‘MX’ underneath."

In
1981, Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, a close friend of and the campaign
chairman for Ronald Reagan, prevailed upon the newly elected
president to ax the program.

Although the program never
put a single missile in the desert, the search for the water it
would have required significantly advanced scientists’
understanding of the desert’s aquifers.